Minute by Minute: Pandorum

There’s just a hell of a lot of movies out there, and with an ever-increasing number of distribution channels (theaters, VOD, Netflix, Red Box) it becomes easier to sample and experiment with films you might otherwise ignore. Flat fees and dirt-cheap rentals make it that much easier to try something out and, if it’s not working, toss it out without a backwards glance.

Bureau Chief Dorian Wright has an almost supernatural tolerance for the borderlands of genre film, and in Minute by Minute he gives a stream-of-consciousness assessment of whether or not these fringe films work. In this week’s installment, he takes on Pandorum, the story of two crew members on a space ship bringing colonists to a newly discovered planet, who awaken from their cryogenic slumber to discover that the ship has gone off course and been infested with strange creatures.

00:01:00
A future history, as we’re treated to “milestones” of space exploration that take place plausibly far enough in the future that by the time the dates actually roll around, no one will be alive to laugh at how badly they got it wrong.

00:01:45
You know, I could really do without science-fiction films opening on a long pan over a fake space-ship.

00:03:20
Good thing that cryogenics chamber has a modesty panel.

00:04:40
Oh, good. Blackness.

00:05:45
Something for 10% of the male audience members, I see.

00:07:35
Laser razor. I somehow feel that’s not going to be the only example of a perfectly useful modern device rendered “futuristic” in a way that makes it far less practical.

00:08:10
Nearly-naked Dennis Quaid. I would have loved this move when I was thirteen.

00:08:30
Both our leads have amnesia because of the cryosleep. I’m sure that won’t lead to a plot twist later in the film.

00:10:30
The power for the ship’s computer has to be hand-cranked? Really, movie?

00:13:50
Spiders in the maintenance ducts. Yeah, we’re being set up for the “jump” scare here.

00:55:20
Okay, so as all the humans get their asses handed to them by ONE of the freaky mutant albino cannibals, I have to ask; since it’s clear that the cannibals are the “evolved” survivors of the crew, how did they turn into super-fast, super-strong predators when their primary source of food would appear to be cryo-genically frozen humans? Surely that suggests carrion eaters or scavengers as a base. And while I myself wouldn’t want to tussle with an hungry hyena, I’d rather a hyena than a lion, you know?

00:55:50
If it takes three humans to kill one cannibal, and they still got their asses handed to them, they really are screwed.

01:00:45
Ah, the inexplicably well informed crazy person. Some horror tropes never die.

01:01:35
So far the “Dennis Quaid locked in a room with a guy and one of them is probably crazy” film is better than the “Ben Foster runs away from albino mutants” film.

01:13:33
Creepy albino kid, at last. The money shot from all the trailers. Took way to long to get there.

01:18:40
So, the reactor, which they need to save the ship, can only be reached via a narrow walkway, over a pit filled with cannibals, in a chamber with electrical arcs in it. Industrial designers in the future are all on crack, aren’t they? Well, space-crack.